The Assistant Erased You: Measuring Loss of Authorship Signals in AI-Mediated Communication

Research on AI-mediated communication has examined how AI assistance shapes interpersonal perceptions and reduces stylistic diversity across users. We ask a complementary question at the individual level: after a message is rewritten by an AI writing assistant, can its author still be distinguished from others? We introduce the Idiolect Erasure Rate (IER), defined as the reduction in authorship-attribution accuracy following AI-assisted rewriting. We evaluate IER on three pre-generative-AI corpora using a stylometric model and the authorship-specific LUAR model. Heavy rewriting substantially weakens authorship signals in personal blogs and workplace email, reducing LUAR attribution by as much as 66.5 percentage points, but has a much smaller effect on topic-structured news, where topic remains predictive of authorship. Additional analyses suggest that rewriting produces stylistic convergence despite substantial semantic overlap, and that content-sensitive attributers understate the loss captured by authorship-specific models. Heavily rewritten messages may also evade AI-text detectors, making them difficult both to attribute to their human authors and to identify as AI-assisted, a phenomenon we call double erasure. IER measures computational attributability rather than human recognition, and we release it as an open and reproducible protocol for evaluating authorship-signal loss in AI-mediated communication.